In order to facilitate the gender equality for employment, we decided to take a deep dive analysis into the contributors of gender gap.Through looking into the gender gap of OECD countries, our project objective is to find what variables or aspects are related with gender gap
Many literature discuss and research about the parental leave policy with gender issues. A research paper in 2008, Ray, Gorick and Schmitt suggest that leave policies can either reinforce or relieve the gender inequality in both work and family. They find the unpaid feature of the FMLA in the U.S. works against women. The reason is that men who usually have a higher income are less likely to take the unpaid leave than women, which then lead more women stay at home to do the care work. (Ray, Gorick and Schmitt, 2008)
Most scholars consent the dual earners, dual carers model that the government promote in order to achieve gender equality. Many researches indicate paid parental leave will lead more father to take the leave and allow mothers to stay in the labor force (Bowman, 2014; Zimmerman, 2015)
Based on the literature review, we have the hypothesis that gender gap will be narrowed down if government can develop more related policy and provide more support to families. For example, countries has more benefit like parental leave policy, cash allowance for families have narrower gender inequality between male and female.
For the method, we performed an exploratory data analysis to investigate the correlations between variables and gender gap of OECD Countries. Since the data of gender gap in terms of employment rate is more complete compare to family work participation of parent, we mostly analyze the gender gap using the measurement of labor participation. we deployed a relatively small portion of analysis about paid parental leave reserved for father and mother to measure the gender equality since we can understand how much time father and mother contributed in terms of taking care of their children.
Moreover, we specifically conducted a case study of United States to explore more about the specific policies associated with gender equality.
We have three dataset for this project:
Employment(OECD database): 295,119 observations, includes three key metrics for different age groups in 39 countries: the employment/population ratio, unemployment rate, labor force participation rate
Family(OECD database): 11,639 observations, includes four key metric we care about for 39 countries: gender gap in employment, paid parental leave for mothers and fathers, fertility rate, government social expenditure on family as percentage of GDP
Speech: Considering presidents will usually present their vision of America and set forth their goals for the nation, thus we collected President’s Inaugural Address of US from 1960 to 2022(four-year term),and want to apply text analysis to explore whether president pay attention to “gender gap for employment” or “women unemployment” on their goal for nation.
We mainly look at the data from 2017 for correlation analysis because COVID-19 impose a huge influence on employment/unemployment for 2019-2022, which will bias the gender gap effect on employment, and government social expenditure data are not comprehensive for 2018. Thus, we choose data of 2017 as our main observations.
Visualize the gender gap and government expenditure on family from overall perspective by using Geo-spacial visualization and Line chart
For the map, we divided the countries into 4 quantile. The first quantile has the gender gap between 0.4 to 6.8, which are countries doing the best in term of gender equality (Employment). For example, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Latvia and Canada. Countries like Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Japan, Columbia are countries have the lowest gender equality in terms of employment rate gap, which are falls into the fourth quantile between 15.5% - 38.5%
Use gender gap rate in 2017, we concluded 5 best and 5 worst courntries in terms of gender gap rate. We specifically investigated how their gender gap evolute through the history. The result shows that the overall gender gap for these 10 countries were narrowing from 1990 to 2017. For the best 5 countries, they seems to do a good job on gender equality since 1990, and most of them are close to the eqaulity line in terms of employment gap. For countries like Malta, although it still rank the worst 5 gender gap country in 2017, we can see that it actually had improved from 41.9% to 20.4%. Koreal improved a little from 25% to 19%.
From the result, there has an obvious comparison of fertility rate between the “worst” and “best” gender gaps country. In particular, for countries tend to be gender equality in terms of employment rate, they have much lower fertility rate than countries which have a worst gender inequality in terms of employment rate. Further, we can observe a trend of decreasing fertility rate for worst gender gap countries.
From this plot, we can see an overall positive relationship for gender gap and fertility rate. Although most countries are concentrated on the left corner, which shows slightly relationship between gender gap and fertility rate. However, for several specific countries, for example,Turkey, Mexico and Costa Rica, have large gender gap and relatively high fertility rate at the same time.It probably can be explained by that women cannot receive equal treatment during the employment and thus more women get married and give birth to child. In addition, from the result of government expenditure we get previously, these countries also have very low social expenditure on family.
The “best” countries are selected from previous result, which have least gender gap. From the above graph, we can see the gender gap for all ages are quite small. Although gaps for birth age, which is generally from 25 to 40, are relatively larger than other age groups for Finland and Latvia, they still converges very soon. This might be the result of their good policy to leverage the gender inequality, for example, Norway have 15 weeks parental leave for fathers and Sweden have 14.5 weeks.
The “worst” countries are selected from previous result, which have largest gender gap.Compare with last graph, we can see the gap between employment rate for women and men are much bigger than the previous graph. For Turkey and Korea, for women in ages of giving birth(25-40), it shows much larger gap between men and women. From the previous result, we know that the government of the these countries all have low social expenditure on family and less weeks for parental leave for fathers. They don’t have good policy to eliminate the employment gap between men and women.
For United States, we can see the employment gap for men and women is larger in age of birth(25~40), compared with other ages. This can be explained by that until today, FMLA (The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993) is the only labor law in the US, which provide employees with job-protected but unpaid leave for qualified medical and family reasons. Compared to other OECD countries, where paid leave are common policies for expectant mothers, US fall behind. Also, from the previous result, we can see United States has less public social expenditure on family than other countries and has no paid parental leave for fathers.
The backward in policy-making is consistent with our research regarding the presidential inaugural address since 1960. From the word cloud, we can notice that the presidents paid little attention on the issue of gender inequality. Words like “women” or “gender” do not even list in the top100 most frequently used words.
The Datatable below has the ranking by gender gap of OECD countries with their public expenditures on families.